Academy CEO Bill Kramer, “We Don’t Want to Legislate Art” But…

Scott Feinberg does good journalism here and gets the story, asking key questions most people will want to know. And by “most people” I mean the tiny handful of the faithful who remain even remotely interested in the Oscars at all. Frankly, and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, we’re in “let them eat cake” territory by now.

The thing about journalism is this: if people aren’t afraid of you then you most likely aren’t a journalist. You’re some kind of hybrid of a PR person. Journalists are supposed to scare people at the top. Feinberg is doing here what too few have done lately.

In the piece, the new CEO Bill Kramer would like all 23 categories reinstated. He would also like having a host. They are paying attention to the new wave of “gender neutral” categories but no plans so far to put them in place.

But Feinberg has done here what almost no other journalist in this town would ever do. He asks about the controversial “inclusivity mandate” applied to all films hoping to qualify for the Oscars. The answer is interesting and gives you a glimpse into the minds of the people making all of these calls.

“We don’t want to legislate art. That’s not what this is about. We want filmmakers to continue to make the films they want to make. I’m very happy to announce that the best picture nominees from this past year all would have qualified under our inclusion standards.” He continued, “At the all-member meeting we’ll be talking more about that because that’s a big point of discussion for our members, and we want to be very clear that we don’t want this to be onerous or punitive; we want this to be collaborative.”

So here’s the thing. Feinberg asked the question, a miracle in and of itself that anyone would.  There is no way any person in power in Hollywood who is collecting a paycheck is going to talk frankly about what has happened to Hollywood since 2020.

The biggest change to Hollywood since the Hays Code and the Black List has reversed free market ideology. What is happening to movies now is more or less the thing Hollywood was trying to prevent back in the 1940s and 1950s. They wanted to keep Communism out of movies. That is why they created a Black List. Many of those screenwriters actually did want to inject Marxist ideology into films. It had to be done secretly. Since our government and most corporations were against Communist ideology (after having allied with Stalin during WWII to defeat Hitler, our government was now worried about Communism spreading worldwide and to our country).

I’ll give you an example of how dramatically things have changed. The Lifetime Movie Network pumps out thrillers daily. They almost always follow a few basic plots. Psycho husband or boyfriend, psycho ex-girlfriend, psycho mother, psycho doctor, etc. In almost every one of these movies a female is in trouble and must escape. Up until 2020, nearly all of the protagonists were pretty white women. After 2020, there is a noticeable shift to be more inclusive. Usually, this means a mixed-race couple at the center. Either a white woman and a non-white man or a non-white woman and a white man.

One of the more entertaining of their new slate of “woke” movies would be Single Black Female, where instead of two thin white women, there two plus-sized Black women. Usually, though, there isn’t such a strong effort to bring a different tone to these movies. They serve a single purpose. Inserting people of color in the main roles doesn’t change the plot in any other way. And given how obsessed the American Left has become with race — microaggressions, antiracism, etc — it is always odd to watch the characters play out in their archetypical roles with different skin colors. We aren’t even aiming to live in a “color blind” society because that ideology has been deemed racist. Yet, in most cases, that is one of Hollywood’s only coping mechanisms with how things have changed.

Single Black Female is, to my mind, better than your average Lifetime movie. I wish it had been made as an actual movie in theaters because I think it would have made money. It’s well done mainly because they aren’t attempting to mimic the Lifetime template so much as they are reinterpreting a class movie from the ’90s. It’s done with camp and humor.

What they want is to subvert human tribal behavior. Usually, a majority of any group wants to watch or listen to voices and faces that reflect their group or cultural experience. Since white people have been the majority throughout American history and still are, the market would often respond to stories featuring white characters and white culture. Lifetime movies have traditionally been about as white-bread as you can imagine.

But Lifetime’s base — white women — have become the most strident of the antiracism activism. Thus, seeing people of color in a Lifetime movie (it’s questionable whether these films are particularly popular with any other group) makes them feel good. It makes them feel less guilty, less paranoid, etc.

And ultimately, that is what all of this is about. A friend of mine called the way the Oscars featured almost all Black performers and presenters as a “new kind of blackface.” The Academy is 80% white. America is roughly 60% white. America is also 95% heterosexual. Americans believe in God by about 80%. These stats are starting to shift, no doubt. Gen-z tends to be the generation that is more LGBTQIA, less religious, and more “woke” for sure. But we’re still talking about the minority pop, not the majority.

The Oscars can’t draw the majority because they are singularly obsessed with their outward image, as with most of the top 1% that runs Hollywood. They have almost ceased being able to tell good stories and now much find ways to tell good stories under the thumb of fundamentalism. It is wrong to police art in this way, and I don’t care what Twitter thinks about that. It is simply the truth, proven century after century. Dogmatic art is not art. It’s propaganda.

Executives are deathly afraid of being called out for racism. It is bad press they don’t believe they can afford with an army of Orwellian Children Spies breathing down their necks. The Oscars, and much of the films that will pass their required standards, reflect the paranoia in the white community, not the actual power in that community. In other words, how much of it is simply “virtue signaling,” and how much of it is actual change? And if it is change, what is it changing exactly?

Yes, they are trying to legislate art. All the executives at all studios who make content are legislating art. They’re forcing artists to reflect a specific ideology that serves their newfound religion and gets them off the hook. Remember, the people at the top who hold power are still the same – across all institutions of power in this country. They are, therefore, allowing marginalized groups to be presented as proof that they are prioritizing activism.

I think, ultimately, this is not really doing much for anyone in the long run. You can’t make people better filmmakers by handing them awards or giving them good reviews to placate your own desire to be a good Puritan in 2022. That doesn’t give them something to work towards, or any sort of standard to uphold.

We seem to have crossed over into some bizarre new unreality where art is supposed to be like someone’s Instagram — a utopian vision of America. The woke’s avatar to reflect their idealized society. That isn’t the truth. Once you lose access to the truth, you lose everything in terms of art, comedy, journalism, science.

Part of the problem for the American Left where art is concerned is simply that they’ve run out of good stories to tell. They have lost touch with the “struggle” of everyday life. They exist inside of a Brave New World kind of bubble where their biggest problems are ideological angst. Gone are the Frank Capras and the John Steinbecks. There is simply no way for them to really see or understand everyday Americans who have been their target audience since their founding.

What is better than trying to force every filmmaker to adhere to some “Woke” code is continuing to support filmmakers of color, or women, to give them a platform. Artists should be free to write their stories the way they want to without being monitored and scolded for not being “correct.” The result is inauthenticity and distancing from the actual storytelling, provocative storytelling that makes a mark.

Not every story is about race and gender. Not every person’s experience revolves around social justice and treating everyone fairly. Not every story has such a distinct binary of “good” and “bad.” Most people are too afraid to say what they really think. We’re basically all walking alongside a naked emperor, whose schlong is a-dangling, and saying his clothes are really nice.

I understand I played a big role is fighting for diversity and inclusion for many years. The tree had to be shaken. Hollywood was too white for too long. In my wildest dreams, I never thought there would be mandates and thought police and an ever-present panopticon of Puritans turning art into performative dogma. However well-intentioned, it’s not only depressing to watch, and sooner or later, people will look for authenticity wherever they can find it.

What should the Academy do? Stop pandering. They need to get over themselves and stop acting like high priests of the moral code. Remember, America is a big country with a lot of different people in it and probably most you would not agree with it politically. That doesn’t make them “bad.” You can wall yourself off in a doomsday bunker and hope for the best. Or you can simply drop the artifice and remember why there is an Oscars at all and why artists want to tell stories.

Otherwise, what’ the point of any of it? Why not just form a foundation or church and hand out certificates for shining examples of goodness. Artists, though, need to be let out to do what they actually do best.